Reported Profile | Art, Care and Domestic Life Image disclosure: This is an original editorial illustration, not a documentary photograph, artwork reproduction or exhibition view. At Tate Britain, the British-Bengali artist makes a case for domestic invention—not as a private refuge or a decorative motif, but as a place where public history is already being made. This source-led profile draws on institutional records and published reporting. It does not claim firsthand attendance at the exhibition. At the entrance to Mohammed Z. Rahman’s Never the Same at Tate Britain stands a house made of spaghetti. This is not a metaphor added after the fact by a curator looking for a light way into difficult subjects. The Spaghetti House (2024) began with a story Rahman devised with his six-year-old niece; Tate has made the painting the threshold of the first of two theatrical “acts” in its current Art Now presentation. The premise is comic and precise: a home whose roof is made of pasta, whose windows disclose small domestic scenes, and whose skipping rope becomes a noodle in the account published by Hyphen. [1] [2] It is also now a Tate work. Acquired alongside The Lovers (2024) through the Frieze Tate Fund, the painting has travelled an unusually charged route: from a child’s conjectural architecture to a national collection, then back into a display about home, play and joy. [3] That route supplies the real subject of this exhibition. Rahman’s small-scale worlds ask what changes when the modest technologies of ordinary life—shared food, a matchbox, a wooden crate, a bedroom table, a remembered house—enter the museum. The answer is neither that they become grander, nor that they remain untouched. Rather, the works make the conversion visible and uneasy. Tate’s framing is admirably clear. Never the Same, on view through 8 November, consists of a new body of paintings staged in two theatrical “acts,” each housed in a timber pavilion inspired by Bengali wedding canopies and keyed to a Tate collection work. [1] [7] Act One takes The Spaghetti House as its entry point. Act Two begins with The Lovers, a painting of six closely embracing figures that may be standing, lying down or dancing; its title and premise draw on the tarot card. Tate describes subsequent paintings of sorrow and celebration, including a weeping figure amid ex-lovers’ belongings and a shipping crate remade as a box of chocolates. [1] The programme is called Art Now, Tate Britain’s ongoing series for new work by emerging artists. That designation is accurate but incomplete. The interest here is not an abstract promise of “emergence”; it is the quickening institutional life of a practice determined to keep the ordinary legible on its own terms. A house as a social form Rahman’s houses are neither nostalgic stage sets nor sociological diagrams. Their compactness matters. In an independent review of the 2025 Peer exhibition Remember to Live, Sabine Casparie described visitors leaning close to inspect its miniatures, including cross-sections of homes in which seamstresses, pets, food, washing and neighbours occupy distinct but contiguous zones. [4] The form provides an ethic of attention: the viewer must adjust their body to the work rather than expecting the work to command a room. That scale also refuses the false choice between private scene and public matter. At Peer, Rahman’s permanent mural At Home was developed with the gallery’s Ambassadors, a group of 17- to 25-year-olds from Hackney and Tower Hamlets. Its imagined cross-section of a residential building addressed how home might offer shelter and hope while remaining pressured by racism, housing costs and instability. Frieze reported the commission as an extension of Rahman’s conviction that the everyday is where politics take effect. [3] The apartment is not deployed as a symbol of some singular community. It is a working structure: a place of cooking, care, argument, labour and improvised self-fashioning. That is why The Spaghetti House carries more than whimsy. In Hyphen, Rahman connected the work to the urgency of taking children’s dreams seriously amid the reported killing of children in Gaza. The article also identifies the three Spaghetti Rooms in the Tate display as expansions of that invented environment, informed by colourful shared houses in Rahman’s twenties and the East London homes that opened for gatherings at Eid. [2] Those are specific social arrangements, not an atmospheric idea of domestic warmth. Pasta is edible, cheap, unruly and briefly architectural; it lets play become a model for the way a household builds a world out of what is at hand. The distinction is crucial because a museum can too easily aestheticise scarcity. Rahman’s works instead keep material conditions in view. Born in London in 1997 and based there, the British-Bengali artist studied social anthropology at SOAS before finding its established methods inadequate for the layered positions it attempted to describe. La Biennale di Venezia’s 2026 account places that encounter at the origin of a practice extending across painting, sculpture, drawing and zines, where folk tales, historical events and dreamscapes meet. [5] Rahman’s quarrel was not with knowledge itself, but with the removal of knowledge from the people and places under discussion. In Hyphen, he described finding ethnographies of East London Bangladeshi communities inaccessible in both their paywalls and their academic English. [2] Painting becomes a counter-archive here: not a transparent correction to official histories, but a way to allow memory, family lore and the impossible to keep company. The imaginary house is convincing precisely because it does not pretend to documentation. Its visual logic can accommodate a noodle rope, a domestic window and an implausible roof without sorting them into the real and the merely fanciful. That freedom is political in a modest, durable sense. It makes room for an account of experience that is not obliged to arrive in the language of proof. Matchboxes, crates and the question of use Rahman repeatedly chooses supports that retain a prior public life. At Tate, Hyphen reports, miniature paintings of chillies, plants, bread and a half-full glass occupy matchboxes arranged along a shelf and wall; elsewhere, a shipping crate becomes a chocolate box. [2] At Venice, where Rolling Heart remains on view in the Central Pavilion through 22 November, the operational logic is still clearer. The installation puts recent works in an open pine framework, with paintings facing in and out so that images and notes can be seen on their reverses. Shipping crates act as painting surfaces and as seating. [5] The crux is not that a crate has been magically redeemed as art. It is that Rahman declines to let it shed its capacity for use. At Venice, Memento Vivere makes the double register explicit: a crate painted as a condom packet celebrates workers, carers, lovers and agitators of the early AIDS epidemic. [5] A crate holds, transports, supports weight and, in Venice, offers a visitor somewhere to sit. A matchbox is an almost comically limited surface, but it also contains the possibility of flame. In the Peer show, Safe Landing consisted of 48 acrylic-painted matchboxes set across ink-stained wooden shelves; the review records objects and animals within them, as well as the artist’s association of shards of glass with anti-migrant violence. [4] The miniature is therefore not innocent. It makes concentration possible while carrying danger at its edge. This practical intelligence is inseparable from Rahman’s account of making. His mother worked as a seamstress after arriving in Britain in the 1980s, he told Hyphen, and that experience shaped his refusal to rank the skill of clothing production below the category of fine art. [2] Whitechapel Gallery’s 2025 Hearthside, made in partnership with Oitij-jo, developed the same proposition through food knowledge, supply chains and the dinner table. It brought paint, sculpture and installation to questions of hospitality and care, rather than treating cuisine as a picturesque ethnic signifier. [6] The analogy between a seam, a shelf and a painted surface should not be forced; these are different kinds of labour. But Rahman is persuasive because he does not use craft as a reassuring moral gloss. A painted box remains a box. A meal requires ingredients, labour, access and guests. A home can be a site of welcome and pressure at once. Casparie’s review supplies an important restraint: it finds the work most compelling in its imaginative, intimate scenes rather than in its larger sociopolitical stories. [4] The practice’s colours—reported as saturated maroons, greens, indigos and ochres in the Peer review—are not a shortcut to cheerfulness. They are part of an insistence that attention, pleasure and difficulty are allowed to coexist. [4] What a museum can hold There is a productive contradiction at the centre of Never the Same. Rahman has said that he wants to dispel the mythology surrounding the artist and foreground the fact that people make art continually; Hyphen reports that much of the Tate work was made on a bedroom or kitchen table. [2] Yet the exhibition is staged at Tate Britain, supported by named foundations and supporters, and organised around two paintings newly held by the national collection. The institution is not incidental to the argument. It is the pressure that gives it shape. The danger would be to read this as a clean story of elevation: overlooked domestic creativity arrives, finally, at the museum and is certified. Rahman’s own trajectory makes that reading too thin. Before Tate, there were zines and postcard prints sold at house parties; a 2022 Brent Biennial commission after curator Eliel Jones encountered the work online; the 2025 Peer exhibition, Rahman’s first solo presentation in a public gallery; the Whitechapel presentation; and the public mural in Hoxton. [2] [3] [8] These are not simply rungs on a ladder. They are different formats of address, each with its own audience, permissions and limits. Tate’s two-act structure acknowledges this without dissolving it. By making collection paintings the entrance points, the display admits the museum’s role in authorising what may be seen. But the paintings’ internal economies keep pulling attention outward: to a niece’s story, a shared flat, a mother’s skill, a local table, a screen of tiny objects that asks a person to lean close. A serious encounter with this work should not end in gratitude that such material has been admitted to the canon. It should ask what forms of description, care and access the canon still cannot provide. That question matters now because Rahman’s practice arrives in a London saturated with exhibitions about archives, identity and repair, yet it does not begin with the archive’s prestige. It begins with ordinary people making images, stories and arrangements for one another. At its best, Never the Same proposes a more demanding version of public art: not work that speaks for everyone from above, but work that shows how a private table, a matchbox or a made-up house is already connected to the public world. The Spaghetti House is a public institution not because Tate owns it, but because it gives common life a form that can be entered, questioned and remade. Sources & records 1. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/art-now-mohammed-z-rahman "Tate Britain: Art Now, Mohammed Z Rahman" 2. https://hyphenonline.com/2026/07/15/mohammed-z-rahman-artist-never-the-same-exhibition-tate-britain/ "Hyphen: Mohammed Z Rahman, ‘I want to do away with this mythology around being an artist’" 3. https://www.frieze.com/article/life-is-sweet-mohammed-z-rahman-frieze-week-magazine-london-2025 "Frieze: Mohammed Z. Rahman, Life Is Sweet" 4. https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/mohammed-z-rahman-remember-to-live-review-peer-london "Studio International: Mohammed Z Rahman, Remember to Live" 5. https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/mohammed-z-rahman "La Biennale di Venezia: Mohammed Z. Rahman" 6. https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/mohammed-z-rahman-hearthside/ "Whitechapel Gallery: Mohammed Z. Rahman, Hearthside" 7. https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/art-now-mohammed-z-rahman "Tate: Art Now, Mohammed Z Rahman — press release" 8. https://peeruk.org/programme/mohammed-z-rahman-remember-to-live "Peer: Mohammed Z. Rahman, Remember to Live"

News Analysis | Contemporary Art and Museums Image disclosure: This is an original editorial illustration, not a documentary photograph, artwork reproduction or exhibition view. The 2026 Prix Marcel Duchamp brings a practice built from fragments, organisms, sound and anti-colonial archives into the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris’s collection galleries. The real subject is not anointing a “rising star,” but what happens when a museum’s temporary architecture meets an artist for whom history is never singular or settled. This is a source-led analysis, not a first-hand review. The public MAM materials identify the four nominees and the exhibition’s setting, but do not publish a worklist or installation documentation for Ntjam’s 2026 presentation; references to individual works below are dated, independently documented earlier projects. The 2026 Prix Marcel Duchamp is being staged in a condition that is easy to mistake for administrative backdrop. Since renovation work has closed Centre Pompidou’s historic building, the prize has entered a “constellation” period: the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris will host its nominated-artists exhibition through 2029. This year’s show—open from 2 October 2026 to 7 February 2027—places Joël Andrianomearisoa, Brognon Rollin, Laura Henno and Josèfa Ntjam in a dedicated exhibition within the MAM’s collection galleries, with free entry. Odile Burluraux and Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov curate it; the winner will be announced at the museum on 22 October. [1] That arrangement matters more than a change of address. A prize exhibition ordinarily asks visitors to make a quick comparison: four practices, a selection mechanism, a verdict. Placed amid a collection, it becomes a different kind of test. The room is no longer simply a neutral container for new work. It is a public system for ordering modernity—its periods, media and lineages. For Ntjam, an artist who treats images as mobile evidence rather than fixed illustration, that is an unusually charged frame. The prize’s own language is forthright about cultural infrastructure. Founded by the collectors’ association ADIAF in 2000 and organised with Centre Pompidou, it describes itself as a leading contemporary-art prize, backed by a €90,000 endowment of which €35,000 goes to the laureate. The 2026 jury includes museum directors, collectors and two artists; the nomination began with an ADIAF collectors’ selection committee. [1] [2] ArtReview, in an independent account of the shortlist, calls it France’s most prestigious contemporary-art prize and measures its history through prior winners including Kader Attia and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. [3] Both accounts correctly describe a high-visibility platform. Neither, by itself, quite explains why Ntjam is an incisive candidate for this particular temporary museum arrangement. Her work does not merely add an alternative story to an existing canon. It worries at the assumption that history can be displayed as a settled sequence at all. A practice made by joining, not illustrating Born in Metz in 1992 and based in Saint-Étienne, Ntjam works across sculpture, photomontage, film, sound, performance and writing. The MAM’s nomination record gives a useful, non-romantic account of the method: material is gathered from the internet, natural-science books and photographic archives, then assembled as images, words, sounds and narratives. Historical events and scientific discoveries meet African mythologies and science fiction in worlds where fixed systems of naming become unstable. [2] The important word is assembled. It does not mean that research arrives as a decorative cloud around an image. In a 2024 interview, Ntjam described photomontage as a means of resisting linear history: layers of imagery can render connections between people, places and movements that conventional historical narratives split apart. She has spoken of using family photographs alongside pictures found in archives, and of making source material herself—photographing mould in a fish tank, studying plants under a microscope. [4] The result is not a clean replacement history. It is an image-world in which archival scarcity, biological form and political memory remain visibly entangled. That distinction protects the work from the easy vocabulary now regularly attached to it. Ntjam herself told ArtReview that “Afrofuturism” had become a label or contemporary-art aesthetic, whereas her earlier work with the Black(s) to the Future collective understood it as research: a way to connect different points. [4] The correction is material as much as theoretical. A root, a membrane, a body beneath water or a piece of perspex is not there to deliver a generic futuristic atmosphere. It can be an organising device—an apparatus for putting colonial violence, diasporic resistance and nonhuman life into provisional relation. At Fotografiska New York in 2024, Futuristic Ancestry: Warping Matter and Space-time(s) brought that apparatus into legible forms: biomorphic sculptures, video and photomontages printed on plexiglass and aluminium. The independent account in Artsy described how the show drew on her Cameroonian family archives and images of members of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon, an independence movement. In Fire Next Time (2023), layered fire, water, tree roots and marching silhouettes made underground circulation a visual proposition rather than a historical diagram. [6] The specificity is essential: the work’s gleam is never a substitute for the political material carried in its images. What an immersive work can teach a gallery Ntjam’s Venice commission, swell of spæc(i)es (2024), offers the clearest documented measure of the spatial ambition behind the MAM moment. At the Accademia di Belle Arti, LAS Art Foundation presented a cyclical film on a curved LED screen, reflected in a polished black surface, alongside sound, voice and vibration. Fatima Al Qadiri composed its score. Two jellyfish-shaped sound showers were fabricated from biosourced sunflower-seed resin, hemp and hay; a membrane-like structure became a listening and resting space through sound exciters that turned its surface into a haptic speaker. [5] Those are not incidental production details. They show how Ntjam distributes meaning across body, acoustics, screen, support and duration. The Venice project brought Dogon accounts of Amma and Nommo into contact with a Huaorani creation story, plankton research, stellar matter and histories of forced movement through water. [5] ArtReview further reported that its moving image combined computer and hand-drawn animation, photomontage and AI; scans of objects in Western museum collections met images of anti-colonial figures. [4] No single object carried the full argument. Visitors had to move through a set of relays. That logic has since been tested at greater civic scale. For INTRICATIONS (2025–26), the Institut d’art contemporain in Villeurbanne gave Ntjam its 1,200 square metres as well as three display windows in the Gare Part-Dieu metro station—her most expansive exhibition to date. Its first dedicated sound installation joined cardboard and bio-resin to video-game engines, AI, sand, metal and song. The point was not breadth for its own sake: the work placed an exhibition’s interior and a commuter route within the same system of transmission, fugitivity and entanglement. [7] This is why the phrase “within the collections” changes the reading of the current prize show. It should not license conjecture about what Ntjam has installed at MAM, because the public record does not yet provide that information. It does, however, make the exhibition’s institutional situation plain. A collection gallery usually asks an artwork to take its place in a chronology or a category. Ntjam’s past projects ask how the image got there, which bodies or archives were excluded, and what other scales of time—planktonic, ancestral, cosmic, geological—might disturb the category. There is a productive tension here. The MAM/ADIAF framing emphasises accompaniment, international visibility and a prize with clear stakes. [1] [2] ArtReview’s shortlist report emphasises prestige and lineage. [3] Artsy’s 2024 profile, by contrast, caught Ntjam pushing against an expectation in the French art scene that she choose one medium; it also recorded her insistence that writing keeps a work from ending as a merely pretty picture. [6] These are not incompatible accounts, but they produce different artists. One is a nominee in a national apparatus. The other is a builder of systems that are deliberately difficult to reduce to a single medium, genre or polished visual brand. The limit of the prize—and the value of the room A prize inevitably compresses. It asks a committee and jury to distinguish an individual author from a field of practices. Ntjam’s most substantial works, meanwhile, depend on collaboration: the Venice credits name an artistic adviser and writer, producers, animators, a composer, sound specialists, scientific researchers and more. [5] Recognition can make such labour newly visible, but it can also turn a collective technical ecology into the signature of one person. The same risk applies to the shorthand of futuristic Blackness: it can make the work easier to circulate while obscuring its precise archival work and the particular histories it reconnects. That is a reason to look more carefully, not to dismiss the occasion. The relocation from Pompidou is an instance of how a museum city remakes itself during closure: networks of institutions take on functions that once seemed concentrated in one building. At 11 Avenue du Président Wilson, the prize is not parked while it waits to go home. It is being made public under different conditions, beside another institution’s account of modern art. [1] For readers interested in design, the exhibition is a reminder that display is never only a matter of walls and lighting; it is an argument about what kinds of relation a room permits. For collectors, it makes a more searching proposition than a forecast of a career: a work’s significance may lie in its refusal to become a self-contained object. And for anyone following Paris’s cultural geography, Ntjam’s nomination offers an unusually lucid occasion to ask what a collection can be when it encounters an artist whose raw materials include scientific images, family archives, sound frequencies and the historical gaps between them. The title of this moment need not be a prediction of who will take the prize on 22 October. Its stronger claim is architectural and temporal. In the MAM’s collection galleries, the prize room can become a time machine—not because it transports visitors cleanly into a future, but because Ntjam’s method makes the past’s unresolved images active again. The room’s challenge is to let that complexity remain complex. Sources & records 1. https://www.mam.paris.fr/fr/expositions/exposition-prix-marcel-duchamp-2026 "Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris: Prix Marcel Duchamp 2026" 2. https://www.mam.paris.fr/sites/default/files/documents/press_release_-_nominated_artists_-_prix_marcel_duchamp_2026.pdf "Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris / ADIAF: The Prix Marcel Duchamp 2026 — nominated artists press release" 3. https://artreview.com/prix-marcel-duchamp-2026-shortlist-announced/ "ArtReview: Prix Marcel Duchamp 2026 shortlist announced" 4. https://artreview.com/the-interview-josefa-ntjam/ "ArtReview: The Interview — Josèfa Ntjam" 5. https://www.las-art.foundation/explore/digital-booklet-josefa-ntjams-swell-of-spaecies "LAS Art Foundation: Digital Booklet — Josèfa Ntjam’s swell of spæc(i)es" 6. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rising-star-josefa-ntjams-shimmering-otherworldly-works-illuminate-afro-diasporic-history "Artsy: Rising Star Josèfa Ntjam’s Shimmering, Otherworldly Works Illuminate Afro-Diasporic History" 7. https://i-ac.eu/en/exhibitions/24_insitu/2025/769_INTRICATIONS "Institut d’art contemporain: INTRICATIONS — Josèfa Ntjam"

Reported Profile | Public Art and Contemporary Painting Image disclosure: This is an original editorial illustration, not a documentary photograph, artwork reproduction or exhibition view. A green child’s face, scaled for the Whitney’s public edge, made a case for ambiguity as civic design. Taína H. Cruz’s 2026 project asks what happens when a painting returns a city’s gaze. This profile is based on museum documentation and published reporting and interviews. It does not claim firsthand attendance. In spring and summer, a close-up green face looked down Gansevoort Street from the building façade across from the Whitney Museum and the High Line. The painting was Taína H. Cruz’s I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back (2025), presented as the 2026 Biennial’s billboard project from 8 March to 20 September. The museum described it as carrying a “child-like sense of newness and anticipation.” [1] That is a useful beginning, but not an adequate ending. In the Whitney’s audio guide, Cruz gave the work a more volatile temperature: the future can be beautiful and terrifying; the painting joins hope to danger, “like looking at the sun even when you know it might hurt your eyes.” She describes the child’s glow as a future that is close, breathing, and watching us as we watch it. [2] The reversal matters. The work does not simply transmit a future-facing message into the city. It makes the public face the uneasy fact that looking is reciprocal. That reciprocity has a wider logic in Cruz’s practice. In a 2026 Rhizome profile, she described the internet in terms of feedback loops and connected that model to the exchange among body, image, and viewer. [9] The point does not turn the billboard into a tech allegory. It clarifies why its gaze is active rather than merely expressive: the image asks its viewer to enter a relation in which looking returns altered. Cruz’s billboard has now come down, but its question remains unusually sharp for a public-art commission. A smiling child is one of visual culture’s most efficient assurances. Cruz denied the image that ease. The institutional description of anticipation is set against the portrait’s compressed particulars: green tonality, long light hair, exposed teeth, direct eyes. Lydia Eliza Trail, writing in Ocula, called the expression “a gleeful, joyful mania,” a grin that is almost a grimace. [3] Cruz herself told Trail that the eyes, teeth, and leer were intentional; a grin can carry sincerity, malice, humour, or uneasiness, and she wanted a passer-by to have to grapple with it. [3] The difference between those accounts is not a disagreement so much as the project’s operating pressure. The Whitney offered a framework of newness; independent reporting retained the face’s unstable social charge. In a district accustomed to image management—retail windows, event graphics, architectural views arranged for the High Line’s forward motion—Cruz installed a portrait that refused to settle into welcome, warning, or branding. Its achievement was not that it made a building seem haunted. It was that it made a conventional public-facing surface look answerable. A public image that will not become décor A billboard is designed for speed. It gives a city an image before it gives it a thought. Cruz used that condition rather than pretending to escape it. The face’s scale and frontal construction mean that a viewer could register it at a distance; the teeth and eyes then complicate the read. The painting was not presented as a freestanding mural or an act of unsanctioned writing. It occupied the Whitney’s established billboard site, on the corner of Gansevoort Street and Washington Avenue, and was made possible by the museum with TF Cornerstone and the High Line. [1] That sanctioned setting is important: its force comes from being permitted, framed, and still difficult to domesticate. The 82nd Biennial gave the project a resonant institutional setting. Its curators, Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, proposed an exhibition attentive to contemporary feeling and to the question of what it means to call something “American”; its 56 participating artists, duos, and collectives were described through technological affinities, shared mythologies, infrastructures, and other entanglements. [4] Cruz’s billboard turned that expansive programme into a single encounter with a face. Rather than illustrating a thesis about collective feeling, it tested one: Can ambivalence hold an urban public without being smoothed into a mood-board version of mystery? The limit is real. A passer-by gets no gallery sequence, no wall text, no obligation to linger. On a billboard, an expression can be consumed as atmosphere before it is considered as a proposition. That risk is precisely what gives I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back its seriousness. A benignly smiling child would have solved the problem of public legibility. Cruz instead used the most legible device available—the grin—to stage a small failure of instant recognition. The work insists that an image can be public without becoming compliant. The labour inside the apparent immediacy Cruz’s relationship to graffiti is often shorthand for energy or rawness. The Whitney’s account is more exact. It identifies graffiti as a major inspiration, but it also records that Cruz conceived a drawing for a curved fifth-floor gallery wall, repeatedly practised it in the studio until it became a kind of muscle memory, and then executed it on site. The museum connects that directness to the exhilaration and fear the artist associates with growing up in New York. [5] That process complicates the fantasy that an immediate mark has no preparation behind it. Muscle memory is neither spontaneity nor dead repetition. It is a technique for making a body carry an image through a specific architectural condition. In the Biennial, the on-site drawing appeared alongside works titled A Wall That Plays Along, Continuing Anyway, Passage, This Counts, Rest, Cast, and Studio Notes; installation documentation also identifies a projected animation and sculptural element in Cruz’s presentation. [5] [3] The billboard was therefore not an isolated leap to scale but one surface in a practice moving among wall, canvas, projection, and object. Published accounts support that reading without making Cruz into a simple “digital native” parable. Trail reports that Cruz first worked with references from the digital realm and uses a computer to edit and mask video, while the artist says recent paintings have reached toward things the internet cannot contain. [3] In 2025, she appeared in Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, a multi-sited project examining Black cultural production, computation, and new-media histories. [6] Those contexts make the billboard’s seeming plainness more consequential. Its pictorial bluntness is not a retreat from mediated images; it is an experiment in what mediation feels like when it meets a human-scale response to eyes and teeth. The work also declines a stale divide between screen culture and an allegedly pure folklore. Cruz told Ocula that folklore is personal—something one carries—and spoke of symbols and motifs as internally perceived rather than decorative citations. [3] Her own account joins Caribbean folklore, contemporary digital image culture, and New York’s punk-goth sensibility without treating any as a style kit. This is less an iconography to decode than a method of refusing a fixed, hygienic self. The same face can be child, performer, omen, avatar, neighbour, or none of these securely enough to close the question. The billboard’s direct address also has a prehistory in Cruz’s portraiture. Reviewing her 2023 Berlin solo exhibition Hound, Max L. Feldmann situated its faces amid the conditions of the selfie: self-display, scrutiny, and emotional illegibility bleed into one another. [10] The billboard carries that older problem outward. Its fixed grin is not a generalized sign of dread but part of a sustained inquiry into what a face can disclose once it has become an image made for circulation. An institutional leap, not an arrival story The rapid visibility of 2026 invites a familiar art-world simplification: a young painter gets a prominent exterior commission and becomes a new name to circulate. The actual trajectory is more uneven and more interesting. Cruz received an MFA from Yale in 2025, after a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020; records list solo exhibitions in New York, San Juan, and Berlin beginning in 2022, as well as appearances at MoMA PS1, MMK Frankfurt, and MOCAD before the Biennial. [7] Cultured reported that she was the youngest artist in the 2026 Biennial and was also included that spring in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York. [8] The pairing of the Biennial gallery and street-facing billboard made that transition visible in a particularly compressed way. It placed an artist working across media in two differently public conditions: the slow, conditional looking of a museum interior and the involuntary looking of a sidewalk. In Ocula, Cruz resisted the tidy distinction between sculptor and painter, citing a childhood around the garment industry—both of her parents attended FIT—and the fluidity of what an artist can be. [3] That is a revealing claim, not because it supplies a lifestyle gloss, but because it names a practical resistance to disciplinary neatness. Her 2026 installation makes the point materially: a mark is rehearsed, a portrait is painted, a moving image is edited, and an architectural edge becomes a support. Cruz’s present is not limited to the Biennial’s afterlife. Her second solo exhibition with Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Pixie Theatre, is on view in Berlin through 7 November. The gallery frames its paintings as scenes governed by association rather than stable narrative, where recognition can turn enigmatic—a current, more extended setting for the instability the billboard concentrated at street scale. [11] There is no need to make the billboard carry every history Cruz has named. The artist’s own accounts of African American and Puerto Rican family ties, summers in South Carolina, digital culture, and folklore are not an invitation to turn the face into a biography diagram. [3] The stronger reading stays with the formal problem. Cruz has made an expression that carries more signals than the viewer can reconcile at first glance. The portrait’s power lies in keeping that surplus visible. Why the grin matters now The most persuasive contemporary public art does not assume that access and agreement are the same. Cruz’s billboard was accessible in the literal sense: it sat outside the museum, available to people who did not enter the galleries. But it did not flatter the speed of the encounter. It offered a direct address and withheld a stable instruction for how to feel about it. That is why the project deserves attention beyond the Biennial’s calendar. At a time when cultural institutions often speak in the soft language of participation, Cruz’s work proposes a harder form of contact: to be addressed by an image that neither confesses nor reassures. The future in her title does not arrive as a clean visual identity. It grins, watches, and makes the viewer responsible for the next interpretation. Sources & records 1. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/taina-h-cruz "Whitney Museum of American Art: Taína H. Cruz, I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back" 2. https://whitney.org/guides/140?stop=14831 "Whitney Museum of American Art audio guide: Billboard, Taína H. Cruz" 3. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/taina-h-cruz-whitney-biennial-portrait/ "Ocula: Taína H. Cruz, There Are Many Ways to Challenge a Viewer with a Portrait" 4. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2026-biennial "Whitney Museum of American Art: Whitney Biennial 2026" 5. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2026-biennial/art?section=15 "Whitney Museum of American Art: Whitney Biennial 2026, Taína H. Cruz" 6. https://mocadetroit.org/exhibitions/code-switch-distributing-blackness-reprogramming-internet-art/ "Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit: Code Switch, Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art" 7. https://www.k-t-z.com/artists/104-taina-h.-cruz/ "Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler: Taína H. Cruz" 8. https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2026/03/04/art-taina-cruz-whitney-biennial/ "Cultured: Step Into the New Haven Studio of Taína Cruz, the Youngest Artist in the Whitney Biennial" 9. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2026/mar/23/artist-profile-ta%C3%ADna-cruz/ "Rhizome: Artist Profile: Taína Cruz" 10. https://elephant.art/no-escaping-the-nastiness-taina-cruzs-portraits-in-the-age-of-the-selfie/ "Elephant: No Escaping the Nastiness: Taína Cruz’s Portraits in the Age of the Selfie" 11. https://www.k-t-z.com/exhibitions/86-pixie-theatre-taina-h.-cruz/ "Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler: Pixie Theatre, Taína H. Cruz"

Cultural Analysis | Art, Space and Relation Image disclosure: This is an original editorial illustration, not a documentary photograph, artwork reproduction or exhibition view. In Rebecca, her first major institutional exhibition, Benni Bosetto converted a former locomotive shed into a body-house of hand-painted paper, low thresholds and scheduled dance. The point was not comfort as décor. It was to test whether an interior can make time, desire and social relation felt differently. This is a source-led assessment of Rebecca, which ran at Pirelli HangarBicocca from 12 February to 19 July 2026. It draws on the exhibition’s documentation and independent criticism; it does not claim a visit or firsthand attendance. When Rebecca closed in July, it left a useful question behind: what, exactly, does it mean to make an exhibition “soft”? Benni Bosetto’s answer was neither a pastel mood nor a retreat from seriousness. It was a material proposition. In Pirelli HangarBicocca’s Shed, the Milan-based artist used hundreds of hand-painted paper strips, fabric partitions, lowered doors, old and new sculpture, and a weekly tango performance to convert a vast industrial volume into something more vulnerable and less stable: an interior that behaved like a body.[1] The occasion matters because Rebecca, curated by Fiammetta Griccioli, was Bosetto’s first major institutional exhibition.[1] But it also matters because the building is almost comically resistant to the usual language of intimacy. The Shed began life as part of Breda’s Bicocca works, where components for locomotives and agricultural machinery were manufactured; the broader district was remade after industrial decommissioning into a mix of university buildings, offices, housing and cultural infrastructure.[2] A domestic environment placed there can easily read as a lifestyle vignette against the factory’s brick and steel. Bosetto’s more ambitious move was to refuse that clean opposition. Her soft architecture does not conceal the factory so much as make its scale answerable to a hand, a surface and a schedule. A house that does not settle down The exhibition took its title from Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca, in which a house retains the force of a woman no longer present. Pirelli HangarBicocca framed Bosetto’s version as an “architectural female body”: a tripartite organism divided into la guancia (the cheek), la pancia (the belly) and il cuore (the heart).[1] That reading is useful, though it risks making the body sound like a curatorial diagram. The stronger idea is that architecture here does not simply contain a body, or represent one. It sets the conditions by which a visitor must register scale, proximity and permeability. The entry work, La bocca (2022), was documented as a sheet of iridescent, scale-like fabric carrying a large circular eye. It offered an important correction to the convention of the visitor as master observer: before the show became an interior, it gave the interior an organ that watched back.[3] Around it, Le cellule (2026) covered the Shed’s walls. Frieze counted 260 vertical strips, hand-painted with anatomical fragments, aphrodisiac and invasive plants, and collaged jewellery; the institution describes further marks of kisses, nipples, the recurring letter R and plants associated with fertility, persistence, dreams or oblivion.[1] [4] That density is the show’s real architecture. Paper does not have the authority of masonry, and Bosetto uses its weakness. A strip can overlap, wrinkle, repeat, hang like a curtain or read as wallpaper. It can be pattern and membrane at once. The hand is legible not as a signature flourish but as accumulated duration: independent critic Riccardo Conti places the laborious strips against the fantasy of mechanically produced decoration, while Bosetto has described the large-scale drawing process as a kind of diary composed over time.[5] [6] This is why the word “soft” deserves more than its design-world association with upholstery and mood. The show turns ornament into a working surface, one that retains contact and resists instant legibility. Conti also places that choice against the longer devaluation of ornament as feminine or pathological, making Bosetto’s refusal of a clean split between decorative surface and “rational” structure a gendered proposition, not merely a stylistic one.[5] Conti’s report also gives that labour a biographical, rather than merely stylistic, line: he notes that Bosetto’s father was a decorator and wallpaper hanger, citing the exhibition catalogue.[5] The detail is instructive because it keeps Le cellule from becoming a generic revival of maximalism. Pattern is not a decorative surplus applied after the serious spatial decision. It is the means by which space is made specific, time-consuming and bodily scaled. The long route to the Shed This was a museum-scale escalation, not a sudden change of medium. Bosetto, born in Merate in 1987 and based in Milan, studied painting and then sculpture at Brera; in Florida at Tile Project Space in 2016, she already covered the gallery in hand-drawn paper.[3] Her 2022 performative work Stultifera, staged at Bologna’s Pinacoteca Nazionale during Art City, assembled literary, theatrical, cinematic, musical and dance references around Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools.[7] The through-line is a practice that treats exhibition-making as a score for objects, surfaces and people rather than as an orderly sequence of autonomous works. That matters for how the older pieces functioned in Rebecca. In the cheek, veiled partitions and seating surrounded sculptures whose materials include bronze, iron, ceramic and pomegranate branches. The institutional guide identifies Confessionale animale as a fabric-and-paper corridor marked by the artist’s childhood practice of kissing a bedroom doorframe; nearby heart-shaped stools were deliberately sized for dogs and cats.[3] These details could be misread as quaint autobiography. More productively, they establish an anti-monumental scale: a room is not only a room for an upright adult human. It is a place organized by habits, dependent creatures, lowered voices, accidental touch and minor rites. The central belly makes the point more forcefully. Bosetto laid nine new works from Le porte (2026) horizontally across a green-carpeted space. Doors ordinarily manage access and exclusion; hers become containers for small arrangements, including older work recast within the new setting.[4] In the exhibition guide, Bosetto calls them interfaces for care and coexistence, explicitly invoking the boxed constructions of Joseph Cornell and Fausto Melotti’s miniature theatres.[3] A threshold that cannot be opened does not become useless. It becomes a site that has to be approached from above, around or by bending down. Bosetto put that physical adjustment succinctly in a February conversation: horizontal doors become “fields, gardens, cemeteries,” and bending changes perception.[6] The statement is more revealing than the show’s abundant symbolism. Softness here is not frictionless access. It is a refusal of the vertical, efficient doorway—the form that sorts people into inside and outside—and an invitation to look at an object as a habitat rather than as a sealed possession. For collectors as much as for exhibition designers, that is a useful complication: a bronze, ceramic or paper work in Bosetto’s orbit gains force from the relations it stages, not from isolated preciousness. The risk inside the refuge The heart, where Tango (II version) took place, makes clear that the house was intended to be social rather than simply private. The installation recreated a milonga with tables, chairs, a stage, soft lighting and a dance floor. Once each week, amateur performers danced tango in headdresses suggesting animals, birds, insects, molluscs and small terrestrial landscapes; the piece had an earlier performance form at Castello di Rivoli in 2024.[3] Its reference to tango was not ornamental either. The guide situates the form’s history in late-19th- and early-20th-century Buenos Aires and Montevideo, shaped by encounters among local African communities and European immigrants.[3] Still, the heart exposes the exhibition’s most credible limit. The institution described a welcoming refuge for rest, dreaming and relation. Frieze, while admiring the paper installation’s tactile domestic force, found that it could also produce an “oppressive sense of enclosure”; it further observed that the dance room was essentially empty between performances, except for the dancers’ headdresses.[4] Federico Giannini’s dissenting review in Finestre sull’Arte went further, arguing that the domestic premise became self-referential and that the social claim of the milonga was unavailable outside its weekly, approximately two-hour activation.[3] [8] The latter is a judgment, not a settled verdict. Yet it identifies a formal problem worth taking seriously: an environment cannot simply declare itself hospitable. It must negotiate the gap between staged invitation and actual use. Bosetto’s answer was conditional rather than seamless. A visitor encountered traces, props and an anticipated choreography on most days, and living bodies only at set times. That incompleteness may frustrate the promise of collective ease. It also prevents Rebecca from resolving into an image of domestic harmony. The house remains a score with absences; desire is not guaranteed by a red tablecloth, a curtain or a soft surface. This tension is precisely where Bosetto’s achievement survives the exhibition’s closure. Her work refuses the common equation of care with polish, and of political feeling with a blunt message. It insists instead that care has a spatial grammar: a membrane is both boundary and contact; a door can hold as well as bar; decoration can carry labour; a room can make absence palpable. The argument is especially pointed in Milan, where interiors are readily treated as visual evidence of taste. Rebecca proposes a less marketable standard. An interior becomes meaningful not when it photographs as an atmosphere, but when its materials alter how bodies wait, look, rest and meet. That is why a serious reader should care now. Bosetto is building a language for an art world increasingly fluent in immersive environments but still too willing to mistake immersion for experience. Her contribution is not another spectacular room. It is a more demanding proposition: that softness has a structure, a cost in time, and an ethics of attention. In the Shed, the former factory did not become a home by forgetting what it had been. It became a testing ground for whether a public institution can make room for vulnerability without turning it into a consumable look. Sources & records 1. https://pirellihangarbicocca.org/en/exhibition/benni-bosetto/ "Pirelli HangarBicocca: Benni Bosetto, Rebecca" 2. https://pirellihangarbicocca.org/en/history-of-the-building/ "Pirelli HangarBicocca: History of the building" 3. https://web-assets-hangarbicocca.pirelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Benni-Bosetto-Exhibition-guide.pdf "Pirelli HangarBicocca: Benni Bosetto, Rebecca — Exhibition guide" 4. https://www.frieze.com/article/benni-bosetto-rebecca-2026-review "Frieze: Benni Bosetto Recasts the Gothic Body" 5. https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/benni-bosetto-riccardo-conti-pirelli-hangarbicocca-milan-2026 "Mousse Magazine: Benni Bosetto, Rebecca at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan" 6. https://www.koozarch.com/interviews/is-this-seat-taken-lunch-benni-bosetto-asad-syrkett-latteria-san-marco "KoozArch: Is This Seat Taken? Lunch with Benni Bosetto and Asad Syrkett" 7. https://cultura.gov.it/evento/art-city-2022-stultifera-di-benni-bosetto "Italian Ministry of Culture: Art City 2022, Stultifera di Benni Bosetto" 8. https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/exhibition-reviews/benni-bosetto-at-hangarbicocca-when-the-contemporary-digs-inside-an-innocuous-bric-a-brac "Finestre sull’Arte: Benni Bosetto at HangarBicocca"

Reported Profile | Art, Memory and Material Image disclosure: This is an original editorial illustration, not a documentary photograph, artwork reproduction or exhibition view. On the museum terrace, a rebuilt chimney became less a monument to recovery than a precise argument about the forms that memory can—and cannot—take. This source-led postscript draws on published museum records, independent reporting, and installation documentation. The author did not attend the Whitney presentation or visit Akashi’s Altadena property. A chimney is not a home A chimney is architecture’s most stubborn fragment. It persists after a house has gone because it is a core built to bear heat, weight, weather and the force of rising air. But it is not a dwelling. It cannot hold a table, the practical clutter of a studio, or the routines that give rooms their human use. That distinction makes _Monument (Altadena)_ (2026), Kelly Akashi’s glass-brick reconstruction of the chimney and walkway left after the Eaton Fire, unusually exact. It did not offer the consolations of an intact house, and it did not pretend that an artwork could return one. The work anchored Akashi’s Hyundai Terrace Commission at the Whitney Museum of American Art, presented from March 8 through August 23 as part of the 2026 Biennial. On the museum’s fifth-floor outdoor gallery, the Los Angeles artist’s project also included a weathering-steel relief, five works on paper and an outdoor-screen animation. The institutional language described the chimney and pathway as both reconstruction and memorial; it said Akashi worked with a mason to rebuild them in luminous cast glass brick after the January 2025 fire destroyed her home and studio, leaving the chimney standing. [1] [2] The particularity matters. The Eaton Fire was not a metaphor before it became material for art. CAL FIRE records it as a 14,021-acre Los Angeles County fire that began on January 7, 2025; the current assessment lists 9,419 structures destroyed and 19 confirmed civilian fatalities. [3] In the New York Times, Travis Diehl situated Akashi among the many people who lost houses, reporting that she left with her cat and a few keepsakes while fire consumed her block early the next morning. He also gave the museum work a useful, unromantic measure: a 13-foot chimney and walkway in clear glass brick. [4] That scale belongs to public sculpture, but the form rejects public sculpture’s usual rhetoric of permanence. A chimney cast in glass is a contradiction with very little ornament around it. It has weight and joins, yet it admits light; it recalls masonry while surrendering the privacy and insulation of a wall. The 821 hand-cast bricks of the chimney and 538-brick walkway were fabricated and assembled in Akashi’s studio, according to Dezeen. Akashi told the magazine that solid glass let her rebuild through “a different material language, where weight and fragility coexist.” [5] That is not a decorative flourish. Glass changes the proposition of rebuilding from replacement to translation. The long practice behind the emergency It would be too easy to treat this as an artist discovering loss through catastrophe. Akashi had already spent more than a decade making sculpture out of transformations that retain evidence of their previous states: hand-blown glass, wax, bronze, stones, rope, photographs, body casts, hair. Her 2022–24 survey, Kelly Akashi: Formations, was the first major exhibition and catalogue of the work; it traveled from the San José Museum of Art to the Frye Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. [6] The point of recalling that itinerary is not résumé building. It establishes that her present use of glass belongs to a practiced syntax, rather than being an expedient way to render tragedy beautiful. Akashi initially trained in analog photography, and the photographic logic remains close to her casting. In an interview with Artforum, she described bronze casting as a passage from an original subject through a negative mold to another positive, often using molds only once. She connected the process to a desire for “the least amount of translation between subject and object,” while valuing the glitches that result when material refuses flawless reproduction. [7] The answer clarifies why a reconstructed chimney is not a replica in the souvenir sense. It is a second object that carries a different record: the initial home, the fire’s subtraction, labor in glass, and a location 3,000 miles away on the edge of Manhattan. The history that courses through this practice is also more layered than a generalized language of ancestry. In Formations, Akashi photographed the trees at Poston, Arizona, where her father and his family were incarcerated during the Second World War. She later cast fallen branches from that site in bronze. [7] A 2022 Los Angeles Times profile recorded her account of returning there during the pandemic, and of the trees likely planted by incarcerated Japanese Americans. It also documented a distinct kind of apprenticeship: Akashi learned candle making from her mother and encountered glassblowing through demonstrations, knowledge that moves by watching hands work rather than through an artist’s statement. [8] This is why the Whitney work’s single phrase, “what remains,” needs to stay concrete. Remains can be a chimney; branches; negatives and prints; a bodily imprint; a scanned pattern; a procedure passed along. They are not, in Akashi’s work, automatically evidence of triumph. At Poston, the surviving trees make duration visible without repairing an incarceration. At Altadena, a standing chimney does not settle the losses around it. The past survives as matter with a stubbornly incomplete address. The doily, the scan, the steel The commission’s most intellectually pointed counterweight to the chimney was _Inheritance (Distressed)_ (2026). Akashi drew it from her grandmother’s doilies, rescued from a family garage sale and later lost in the fire. Pre-fire scans of the textile informed a Cor-Ten, or weathering-steel, relief. [2] A pattern associated with the domestic labor of making and keeping becomes a perforated metal surface: an image that has survived not as heirloom fabric but as data, enlargement, cutting, oxidation. That conversion has a long prehistory in Akashi’s work. A 2021 piece titled _Inheritance_ joined a cast-lead-crystal hand, a ring from her grandmother, and stone from Poston. [6] The earlier construction gave inheritance literal components, each with a different duration and degree of touch. The Whitney relief makes the problem harder. The doily is absent, and the scan must do some of the work of touch. The museum foregrounded Cor-Ten’s association with Minimalism and its coding as masculine; that framing is productive only if it does not make domestic needlework into a soft corrective for an art-historical hard edge. [2] Akashi’s stronger move is to let both things remain difficult: the decorative lattice and the industrial plate, familial care and the stubborn fact that a fire has converted an original into an afterimage. Her related _Imprints_ paper works extended that process of transfer. A 2026 essay for the FLAG Art Foundation states that the enlarged doily patterns were embossed and flocked with book ash salvaged from the site. [9] It is a potentially perilous gesture—ash is easily turned into a scenic sign of destruction—but the technique keeps the source specific. The work does not use “fire” as atmosphere. It asks what a mark can carry when its original textile has no material future. What the terrace can hold The most compelling friction in Monument (Altadena) comes from its location. A terrace is already a threshold: outside, but staged; exposed to weather, but tethered to an institution. The Whitney’s commission is designed to make art operate against the city and built environment, and Akashi used that setting to bring a fragment of an Altadena house into visual contact with New York. [2] This is not an equivalence between the two places. It is a deliberate mismatch. A house’s remaining flue has been lifted from a burned neighborhood into a museum platform maintained for public encounter. Independent accounts sharpened the difference in emphasis. The Whitney named a “site of witness” and a meditation on survival. [2] Dezeen retained the formal problem: the chimney’s familiar outline is unsettled by an unfamiliar solid-glass material, and Akashi acknowledged that a rebuilt neighborhood “can never be the same.” [5] Field Set, a two-day Los Angeles Nomadic Division project at the former home and studio, gave that distance a later, local counterpoint: Akashi’s sculptural interventions and replanted garden shared the site with Phil Peters’s three-hour soundscape made from recordings of demolition and nearby rebuilding. [11] [12] Sampson Ohringer, writing in Artillery after visiting that project, called the museum chimney “ghostly, present but transparent.” He contrasted it with the cracked original that still stood in Altadena, and noted how the Meatpacking District’s brick buildings read through the glass. [10] That last observation makes a necessary limit visible. Transparency can be ethically alert—it refuses the fantasy that the rebuilt object is whole—but it can also make catastrophe exquisitely legible for a museum audience. The relocated chimney asks to be looked through, and therefore risks turning a neighborhood’s emergency into a view. Akashi does not erase that risk; she gives it a form. The walkway’s uninhabitability is crucial. It is not an invitation to imagine oneself home. It is a path whose material transparency makes the distance between subject and viewer, Altadena and the Whitney, insistently apparent. This is also where the title _Monument (Altadena)_ earns its restraint. Traditional monuments announce endurance through mass, legibility and civic permanence. Akashi’s work claims none of those without qualification. The work was a temporary installation; the fire’s recovery is longer than its run, and the destruction it answers included neither a single household nor a single kind of loss. [1] [3] Its memorial force lies in holding apart what is often collapsed in cultural coverage of disaster: reconstruction is labor, a fragment can be charged, and neither converts bereavement into resolution. Akashi’s stated formulation for the project is that remembrance is constructed “through care and persistence.” [2] That is a bracing claim precisely because construction is not restitution. Brick by brick, the sculpture describes a house without offering one back. In a season when public art is often asked to supply an image of resilience on demand, this may be its most serious achievement. It makes a usefully inadequate structure: clear enough to carry light, solid enough to stand, and too incomplete to mistake for repair. Sources & records 1. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/kelly-akashi "Whitney Museum of American Art: Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi" 2. https://whitneymedia.org/assets/generic_file/5077/HTC_B26_DRAFT.pdf "Whitney Museum of American Art: Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi press release" 3. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2025/1/7/eaton-fire "CAL FIRE: Eaton Fire incident record" 4. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/arts/design/kelly-akashi-artist-wildfires.html "The New York Times: A Chimney in Search of a Home Lands 3,000 Miles Away" 5. https://www.dezeen.com/2026/04/03/kelly-akashi-glass-brick-chimney-whitney-new-york/ "Dezeen: Kelly Akashi creates glass chimney as memorial to Los Angeles wildfire losses" 6. https://sjmusart.org/exhibition/kelly-akashi-formations "San José Museum of Art: Kelly Akashi: Formations" 7. https://www.artforum.com/columns/on-eternity-internment-and-the-memory-of-touch-252170/ "Artforum: Kelly Akashi—On eternity, internment, and the memory of touch" 8. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-12-30/kelly-akashi-la-artist "Los Angeles Times: How L.A. artist Kelly Akashi’s work evokes tangled feelings about impermanence" 9. https://www.flagartfoundation.org/spotlight-kellyakashi "FLAG Art Foundation: Spotlight: Kelly Akashi" 10. https://artillerymag.com/kelly-akashi-phil-peters-la-nomadic-division/ "Artillery: Kelly Akashi & Phil Peters" 11. https://www.nomadicdivision.org/journal/kelly-akashi-recommendations-altadena "Los Angeles Nomadic Division: Kelly Akashi's Recommendations in Altadena (Field Set details)" 12. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/05/26/kelly-akashi-performance-altadena-los-angeles-wildfires "The Art Newspaper: Kelly Akashi and friends celebrate Altadena's resilience after Los Angeles wildfires"

Reported Profile | Museum and Visual Culture Image disclosure: This is an original editorial illustration, not a documentary photograph, artwork reproduction or exhibition view. At the Venice Biennale, the Manila-born, London-based artist makes drawing a way to measure what the museum cannot settle: the distance between an object’s catalogue life and the lives it displaced. This source-led analysis considers Pio Abad’s 2026 Biennale presentation through published interviews, institutional records and independent criticism; it is not based on an on-site visit. The smallest instrument in Pio Abad’s Venice Biennale presentation is a 0.3-millimetre pen. It is also the means by which the artist makes the museum’s grandest claims—classification, custody, historical neutrality—look newly contingent. In the Central Pavilion of In Minor Keys, on view through 22 November, Abad brings together ink drawings from 1897.76.36.18.6 (2023–26), his to-scale rendering of the underside of “Powhatan’s Mantle,” and Banua (2026), a new fabric work. The exhibition’s official account is concise about the wager: drawings of objects held by museums are brought into relation with domestic things, craft and a private scale of attention. [1] It would be easy to call this an art of restitution, but that would make it sound too settled. Abad cannot return a Benin bronze with a sheet of paper, nor does he pretend that a painstaking image neutralises the violence of a collection. Instead, he puts pressure on the habits that make objects seem knowable once they have been accessioned, photographed and placed behind glass. The result is not a cleaner history. It is a demand to notice the structures by which one object becomes an artefact and another remains, merely, stuff in a home. A drawing before a claim Abad’s drawings are not casual acts of looking. In a 2026 conversation for Burlington Contemporary, he described a procedure that begins with a photograph—taken or found—enlarged to the scale of the paper. Carbon paper makes coordinates; the pen follows. The method converts a thing into a grid of decisions before it becomes an image again. He called drawing a way of slowing things down, and said that in this process an object becomes “more like a series of coordinates.” [3] That technical sequence matters. It declines the quick authority of the collection photograph, yet does not claim a privileged, unmediated intimacy with its subject. The photograph, carbon transfer and hand are all present in the final result. What looks devotional is also procedural. Vogue Philippines reports that Abad spent roughly five months on the Venice works, using the fine pen to render stitches, knots, cracks and buttons; some drawings approach two metres in height. [2] Enlargement is therefore not a simple magnification of museum detail. It is a way of making duration visible. The title 1897.76.36.18.6 has the bureaucratic cadence of a collection number by design. Abad says it joins the year of the British punitive expedition to Benin with his own address, in the former Royal Arsenal stores at Woolwich; the series sets British Museum Benin bronzes beside measured stacks of belongings from his home. [5] [1] In a 2024 review, Crystal Bennes noted the friction this produces: a jar of Nutella can register a history of palm-oil deforestation in Nigeria, while a personal photograph carries another register of loss. [4] The domestic pile does not sentimentalise the bronze. It refuses the false distance between imperial extraction and ordinary consumption. There is a useful severity in that refusal. A catalogue can make a work of art seem complete by giving it a name, material, date and ownership trail. Abad borrows the catalogue’s visual discipline—scale, outline, inventory—and makes it incapable of closing the case. Each domestic companion changes the bronze’s field of reference without standing in for it. The drawings ask a question that collection databases usually avoid: what relations remain outside the record but inside the object’s afterlife? The reverse side of a collection The Venice presentation extends a research trajectory that became unusually public in 2024. To Those Sitting in Darkness, Abad’s Ashmolean NOW exhibition in Oxford, placed his new drawings and objects beside selected works by other artists and ‘diasporic’ objects he had researched and chosen from Oxford collections; it was one of the four presentations nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize. [6] [7] The recognition matters less as a career trophy than as evidence of the scale of the institutional conversation he had already opened: the artist was not simply borrowing archive material as visual texture but asking what histories museums had made difficult to see. The most direct return from Oxford is I am singing a song that can only be borne after losing a country (2023), a life-size drawing of the underside of the deer-hide object commonly called “Powhatan’s Mantle,” held by the Ashmolean. The Biennale identifies the work as both a transcription and a lament for the histories of dispossession associated with it. [1] Frieze described the original red-pencil and carbon-transfer drawing as 2.4 by 1.8 metres, tracing cracks and contours on the reverse of the mantle rather than repeating its better-known front. [4] That choice of reverse is a formal decision with political force. It denies the museum display its usual frontal promise: the idea that looking has delivered the thing. Yet the work’s value lies precisely in what it does not solve. Bennes’s review makes the necessary caution plain: inviting an artist to recontextualise a collection is not, by itself, the decolonisation of a colonial institution. [4] Abad’s drawing does not return the mantle, repair an accession history or transform a repository into an equal meeting ground. It interrupts the fluency of display. That is substantial, but it is not the same as redress. This limit gives the work its seriousness. Many contemporary museum interventions turn historical injury into an atmospheric prompt for viewers to feel alert, then leave. Abad puts a slower, less easily consumable labour in the path of that response. To look at the drawn reverse is to attend to a surface that was already there but not necessarily meant to be the public face. The act remains one of representation, with all representation’s limits; it is also an argument that the back of an object may be where a history begins to resist its label. Banua, or the risks of kinship If the mantle drawing tests what it means to face a collection object, Banua tests what it means to let a reference change medium. The official account says the work responds to a woman’s top made from mother-of-pearl buttons in Chicago’s Field Museum collection, which holds many objects from the Philippines. [1] Vogue Philippines reports that this monumental work is the first time Abad has taken his drawing practice onto fabric rather than paper. [2] The change is not decorative. It carries a language of stitch, drape and assembly into a practice previously governed by a paper surface and a measured line. The title also refuses a fixed map. Abad told Vogue that banua or banwa travels across Austronesian languages, its meaning shifting among harbour, celestial space and time according to place. [2] This is not a licence to compress an archipelago’s differences into a pleasing image of connection. It is the tension that makes Banua more persuasive: the work’s cosmological and archipelagic associations, as the Biennale’s text has it, are grounded in a specific museum garment and its material grammar of mother-of-pearl buttons. [1] The risk of any aesthetic of kinship is that similarity begins to feel like proof, or that a museum’s disparate holdings become available for a new, frictionless poetry of diaspora. Abad is strongest when the seams remain visible. Fabric gives him another way to insist on relation without declaring equivalence—between an object held in Chicago, a hand-drawn practice developed in London and a Biennale staged in Venice. What travels is not a stable essence but an account of how matter, language and people are made to move. A minor key against the Biennale’s volume Abad appears in the Biennale’s central exhibition, In Minor Keys, not in a national pavilion. That distinction sharpens the charge of Venice, where the rhetoric of national representation is structurally hard to escape. [1] [2] He told Vogue that he enters as a Philippine artist but sees the Biennale’s potential less in nationhood than in temporary community. [2] His position is neither an evasion of origin nor an uncomplicated performance of it. It makes diasporic identity a condition of research: a way to test objects across places without pretending that distance disappears. The official Biennale text frames the Venice works as invitations to “intimate encounter,” drawing artefacts out of vaults and cases into renewed presence. [1] Independent accounts complicate that generous formulation. Burlington Contemporary reveals the calibrated, photographic and carbon-based system behind their apparent intimacy. [3] Kunstkritikk, reviewing the larger exhibition, situates Abad’s bronze-and-domestic stacks within its concern with repatriation and cultural loss, while describing those stacks as provisional rather than resolved. [8] Frieze supplies a related institutional check: transformed encounter does not amount to decolonisation, even when it can make a museum temporarily into a site of connection. [4] That comparison clarifies why Abad matters now. His work does not make the museum vault picturesque, and it does not confuse handwork with moral repair. It asks what the institution’s categories exclude, then answers not with a slogan but with a line so patient that it makes categorisation feel unstable. For a public accustomed to experiencing collections as a succession of finished objects, that is a radical reorganisation of attention. The hand-drawn afterlife is not an alternative museum. It is a disciplined refusal to let the existing one have the last word. Sources & records 1. https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/pio-abad "La Biennale di Venezia: Pio Abad, Biennale Arte 2026" 2. https://vogue.ph/lifestyle/art/pio-abad-venice-biennale-2026-in-minor-keys/ "Vogue Philippines: At the 2026 Venice Biennale, Pio Abad Draws the Distance Between Home and Diaspora" 3. https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/articles/articles/vivien-zhang-and-pio-abad "Burlington Contemporary: The politics of the edges" 4. https://www.frieze.com/article/pio-abad-sitting-darkness-2024-review "Frieze: Pio Abad Reclaims Mapping to Retell Histories of Empire" 5. https://www.pioabad.com/18977636186 "Pio Abad: 1897.76.36.18.6" 6. https://www.ashmolean.org/press/ashmolean-now-pio-abad-turner-prize-shortlist-press-release "Ashmolean Museum: Pio Abad’s Ashmolean NOW exhibition shortlisted for 2024 Turner Prize" 7. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2024 "Tate Britain: Turner Prize 2024" 8. https://kunstkritikk.com/too-much-hope "Kunstkritikk: Too Much Hope"

Reported profile | Visual-culture analysis Image disclosure: This is an original editorial illustration, not a documentary photograph, artwork reproduction or exhibition view. At Somerset House, the Pakistani-born, New York–based painter turns the bar, the cab and the dinner table into sites where art history’s promise of visibility meets its price. This report is based on exhibition records, collection documentation and published independent criticism; it does not claim firsthand attendance. The Courtauld Gallery’s Salman Toor: Someone Like You begins with a proposition that is formally modest and institutionally charged: 19 paintings made between 2019 and 2026, installed in the gallery’s temporary rooms while the collection’s Old Masters and Manet remain close at hand. It is Toor’s first solo museum exhibition in Europe, and it runs from 2 October to 10 January 2027. A concurrent display of drawings extends the encounter beyond the exhibition galleries. [1] [2] The occasion matters because Toor’s subject is not simply identity rendered visible. His paintings ask what it costs to join a room, to be watched in it, and to leave it. Their recurring furniture—bar counters, restaurant tables, a taxi’s back seat, a dresser, the impromptu still life of belongings exposed at a checkpoint—does more than furnish scenes of contemporary queer life. It measures the terms on which people may appear together. In the Courtauld’s setting, those terms are sharpened by a collection built around the great European paintings through which social types, bodies and interiors have so often been made legible. The institution’s framing is hospitably broad: friendship and love sit alongside solitude and alienation, while Toor describes his figures as queer and immigrant lives suspended between "intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement." He adds the crucial qualification: there are "daily costs associated with visibility." [1] The most persuasive reading of the show takes that last phrase seriously. Toor is not asking the museum to certify an already coherent community. He makes the very mechanics of painting—composition, colour, borrowed gesture and the viewer’s point of view—register the pleasures and hazards of being seen. A bar, a mirror, a public The hinge is The Bar on East 13th (2019), an oil on panel made after Toor’s 2017 visit to the Courtauld. The painting revisits Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), which remains in the permanent collection. [1] The premise could have yielded an easy before-and-after: the canonical Parisian night spot recast as downtown New York. Instead, the relation is more useful when understood as an argument about spectatorship. Manet’s last major painting sets the barmaid Suzon before a mirror that sends the crowd, circus entertainment and a male customer back toward the viewer. The reflection is deliberately wrong-footed: figures and bottles do not line up cleanly, and the woman seems at once attended to and alone. [3] In Toor’s version, the historical allusion makes the bar an inherited apparatus for arranging proximity. Who is working, who is looking, who is carried by a crowd, who is left at its edge? The reference carries Manet’s unstable public into a scene of queer sociability without pretending that the two settings share the same stakes. That distinction is where the current exhibition becomes more than a deft art-historical dialogue. The visitor is not always granted the role of companion. In Man With Face Creams and Phone Plug, the scene is composed from the immigration officer’s side of the counter: the arrangement makes the viewer’s gaze share the authority that sorts an ordinary cache of toiletries and electronics. [9] [10] It is an adjustment that prevents the lushness of these paintings from becoming a haze of atmosphere. Toor’s green palette is not a brand identity. It is a visual climate in which attraction and surveillance can coexist. The social world is therefore not a carefree tableau. In Man With Face Creams and Phone Plug, grooming products lose their private, daily ease and become an inventory. [10] In Citizens, two men bring a hand to the chest; the title makes a gesture that might read as romance or solidarity brush against the language of civic allegiance. [11] Such works give concrete form to the exhibition’s larger claim about belonging. They also resist a consoling version of representation in which painting repairs exclusion merely by admitting new protagonists. The old masters are not a backdrop Toor’s relationship with art history is sometimes summarized as a citation practice: Manet here, a Renaissance tondo there, an Old Master gesture reframed for the present. The summary is accurate but too thin. His education as a painter passed through sustained copying of baroque, rococo and neoclassical pictures before encounters with the work of Amrita Sher-Gil, Bhupen Khakhar and Colin David; those South Asian genealogies matter as much as the European ones. [5] The Courtauld is not a neutral storehouse that Toor raids for quotations. It is a setting in which multiple lineages of figure painting are made to press against the institutional story called "the canon." This is also the point at which the independent accounts are more revealing than the official language of belonging. Apollo identifies both the verdigris-lit nightlife pictures and the grimmer checkpoint scenes as defining poles of the practice. [5] Time Out’s account adds the physical variety: thick, parallel green strokes in The Women; the large Ghost Ball (2023), on loan from the Pinault Collection and informed by an Indian miniature of dancers; and Lunch (2019), a circular painting whose Renaissance format contains the cool light of a phone screen. [6] Read together, these accounts describe a painter who does not borrow prestige from the past so much as test the past’s compositional systems under new social pressure. A table makes that test unusually clear. In Lunch, a cold phone screen sits within a circular composition that invokes Renaissance roundels. [6] The image makes a setting feel intensely specific without turning it into ethnographic evidence. A meal, like a party, is an occasion for looking, posing, withholding and belonging imperfectly. The title of this profile is not a claim about the picture’s seating plan; it names the painter’s recurring problem. How can people occupy an image together without becoming a type, a token or a seamless emblem of community? His 2020–21 Whitney Museum exhibition, How Will I Know, established the terms of that problem in paintings of imagined young queer Brown men living between New York and South Asia. The Whitney described a method that joins academic technique to a quick, sketch-like touch: lush interiors of friends, puppies and phones sit against more muted scenes of public vulnerability, including airport scrutiny. [7] Since then, Toor has returned to historical collections with particular purpose—placing Museum Boys near Vermeers at the Frick in 2021 and making van Dyck-inflected paintings for a 2022 Baltimore Museum of Art solo, according to Ocula. [8] The Courtauld show is thus not a sudden coronation but the latest, unusually concentrated version of a working method: paint contemporary life into the spaces where art history already governs attention. Drawing, then disarray The concurrent works-on-paper display makes the method easier to see without reducing painting to preparation. It also makes a recent accession part of the exhibition’s argument: Fag Puddle in Vitrine (2021), acquired by the Courtauld in 2024, appears in the display, and ArtReview reports that the acquisition was an indirect impetus for the current show. [1] [9] The Courtauld identifies ink, charcoal and gouache as its materials; recurring motifs include groups at border control, still lifes and reworked historical scenes. Three Mascots (2023), for instance, follows Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s grisaille The Three Soldiers. [2] Toor has described drawing as second nature, and the institution notes that remembered faces of friends and acquaintances often inform images that otherwise originate in imagination. [2] That is a useful corrective to the assumption that the paintings’ charisma comes only from colour. Drawing gives them a mutable cast: bodies bunch together, posture hardens under a gaze, a hand can become a pledge or a performance. It also permits the oddness that protects the work from becoming illustration. The new, Courtauld-commissioned Fag Puddle with Carriers (2026) is modelled on Lorenzo Lotto’s The Entombment in the collection; its figures carry body parts, but the resulting image is neither devotional quotation nor tidy allegory. [12] It retains the collision of comedy, menace and formal pleasure that a polished story of inclusion would have to smooth away. There is, however, a productive limit to the Courtauld encounter. To hang Toor near Manet and Lotto is to acknowledge that queer, immigrant and diasporic lives belong in painting’s history. But museum proximity can also make difficulty look settled: a radical social world converted into a sanctioned viewing experience, neatly divided between permanent collection and temporary show. Toor’s strongest pictures do not let that conversion close. Their rooms are sheltering but permeable; their tables make company possible but never guarantee it; their glances return the viewer to the unease of looking. That is why this show deserves attention now. At a moment when institutions can too easily treat representation as a completed task, Toor offers a more demanding proposition. Painting is not a ceremonial place at the table. It is the table’s unstable arrangement of bodies, invitations, mirrors, objects and exits. The Courtauld has supplied an exacting historical setting for that argument. Toor’s accomplishment is to ensure that its old social worlds do not remain safely in the past. Sources & records 1. https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh-salman-toor-someone-like-you/ "The Courtauld: Salman Toor, Someone Like You" 2. https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh-salman-toor-drawings/ "The Courtauld: Salman Toor, Drawings" 3. https://courtauld.ac.uk/highlights/a-bar-at-the-folies-bergere/ "The Courtauld: Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" 4. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/arts/salman-toor-courtauld-gallery-london.html "The New York Times: In This Painter’s Seductive World, the Past and Present Meet" 5. https://apollo-magazine.com/salman-toor-someone-like-you-courtauld-london-preview/ "Apollo: Salman Toor, Someone Like You" 6. https://www.timeout.com/london/art/salman-toor-someone-like-you "Time Out: Salman Toor, Someone Like You" 7. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/salman-toor "Whitney Museum of American Art: Salman Toor, How Will I Know" 8. https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/salman-toor-to-see-first-solo-show-in-europe-/ "Ocula: Salman Toor to See First Solo Show in Europe Next Year" 9. https://artreview.com/salman-toors-laws-of-attraction-someone-like-you-courtauld-gallery-london-feature-shaunak-mahbubani/ "ArtReview: Salman Toor’s Laws of Attraction" 10. https://whitney.org/essays/salman-toor-self-as-cipher "Whitney Museum of American Art: The Self as Cipher: Salman Toor’s Narrative Paintings" 11. https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2026/5-things-to-know-about-salman-toor/ "The Courtauld: 5 things to know about Salman Toor" 12. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/10/13/salman-toor-courtauld-gallery-exhibition-runs-the-emotional-gamut-from-convivial-to-fraught "The Art Newspaper: Salman Toor’s Courtauld Gallery exhibition runs the emotional gamut from convivial to fraught"

Format: Think piece — records-based analysis. Image disclosure: The leading image is an original editorial still life, not a museum photograph or a reproduction of the artist’s work. Deck: At London’s Design Museum, Es Devlin’s vast public images are returned to their smallest units: paper, paint, a revolving maquette, a shelf of marked-up books. The result is an unusually lucid argument for the archive as an active instrument, even as it exposes the limits of turning collaborative, time-bound work into a single artist’s legacy. London — 13 October 2026 Scope note: This analysis draws on the Design Museum’s exhibition record, independent reporting by Wallpaper and Designboom, and institutional records of Devlin’s prior work. It does not claim firsthand attendance. The contemporary spectacle often leaves the room before criticism can arrive. A concert stage is dismantled overnight; a ceremonial image survives as a circulating clip; an immersive installation is remembered as an atmosphere rather than an object with a working method. Es Devlin’s work has lived precisely in that condition. Across theatre, opera, stadium tours, ceremonies and public installations, she has made spatial propositions for audiences in motion—narrative machines calibrated to be entered, watched, sung through, or filmed from a distance. [4] [6] Es Devlin: Other Worlds, at London’s Design Museum from 2 October 2026 to 4 April 2027, changes the scale of that encounter. The museum calls it the first European retrospective of Devlin’s 30-year creative practice and the largest solo presentation of her archive to date. Its premise is not simply that a celebrated maker of environments deserves a museum survey. It is that the preparatory matter—drawings, school-era notebooks, collages, diaries, models, books and working tools—can explain how an environment becomes thinkable before it becomes grand. [1] That distinction makes this an exhibition about artistic transmission as much as career consolidation. Devlin’s earlier 2023–24 Cooper Hewitt exhibition, An Atlas of Es Devlin, was described by that museum as her first monographic museum exhibition. Cooper Hewitt located a continuity from small theatres in 1995 to opera, civic commissions, stadium-scale events and installations, with reading, drawing and small cardboard models as the recurring point of departure. [4] London is therefore not an inaugural revelation but a consequential reframing: an American museum had made the archive legible as an atlas; the Design Museum returns it to the city and discipline in which stage design, exhibition design and urban public culture overlap. The desk makes a different claim for spectacle The exhibition’s governing device is the 30-Year Desk, a large circular display built for the gallery. Its contents link a set design for The Lehman Trilogy, the 2012 London Olympic Closing Ceremony, the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show and Forest of Us, Devlin’s 2021 immersive work in Miami, among other projects. [1] Independent accounts make the desk’s density more specific: Wallpaper reports 5,000 objects from Devlin’s personal archive, 30 revolving models and hundreds of sketches; Designboom describes concentric desks gathering drawings, photographs and more than 30 models. [2] [3] The numbers matter less as abundance than as an answer to a familiar misunderstanding. Devlin’s large public commissions can look born at full size, resolved by technical virtuosity and the authority of the final image. The desk insists on recurrence instead. It restores the pauses, substitutions and returns that the finished spectacle necessarily conceals: a sketch becomes a cut-cardboard volume; a volume is lit; the lighting changes the implied path of an audience; an old experiment is carried into an altogether different venue. This is not a romance of roughness. The model is a technical instrument as well as a precious remnant. Cooper Hewitt’s record, for example, specifies a recreated Lehman Trilogy model made from painted MDF, acrylic, cardstock, 3D-printed resin, brass and LED. [4] Read beside a project such as Forest of Us, the detail clarifies Devlin’s medium. The Miami installation began as a film whose screen is periodically perforated so visitors can pass into a mirror maze; it works through the visual affinity of bronchial trees and arboreal branches. Superblue describes a process that moved between paper-and-pencil studies, research and traced X-rays of the bronchial system. [5] The striking image is not the idea’s endpoint. It is a temporary settlement between drawing, research, fabrication, light and the bodies expected to move through it. In a museum, that settlement becomes inspectable. A stage designer’s most durable contribution may not be a particular set or an immediately recognisable silhouette. It may be a method for asking what a room permits a crowd to feel, and how a text, a scientific diagram or a poem can be given bodily scale. The Design Museum’s display has the intelligence to treat the archive as evidence of this method rather than as an after-party for famous commissions. From the studio to the public room The route described by the museum and by independent coverage begins in a detailed reproduction of Devlin’s London studio, with books, objects and maquettes; a video carries her voice. It then moves through an illuminated, mirrored presentation of Come Home Again, the 30-Year Desk and archive material, before ending with Infinite Library. [1] [2] That sequence is unusually explicit: workspace, accumulated practice, reading. It turns the visitor’s route into a proposition about cause and effect. Entry is also timed around a short introductory film, retaining the staged threshold of a performance before the visitor encounters the working matter. [1] At the beginning of the exhibition, the studio is not offered as an intimate lifestyle interior. It is a working ecology: the place where publications, paint, tools and models are kept close enough to affect one another. The adjacent Archive Unboxed brings together sketches, paintings, collages, diaries and prints made from Devlin’s school years onward. The Design Museum presents these as proof that drawing is the origin point for every project. [1] One need not accept an origin story so cleanly to see what it productively does. It makes drawing a verb rather than a brand signature: a way of carrying an image across disciplines without pretending that the image alone built the room. The reappearance of Come Home Again makes a related case. Originally shown outside Tate Modern in 2022, its illuminated cut-out drawings enumerate endangered London species; its earlier structure drew on a section of St Paul’s Cathedral’s dome. [3] In Kensington, the work is installed below a mirrored ceiling, according to Designboom, while the museum describes it as a shrine dedicated to endangered wildlife, newly arranged as a changing constellation. [1] A public artwork about interdependence is thus placed inside an apparatus of reflection. The visual transformation is not incidental. It makes a work first calibrated to a particular London exterior available as a museum image—but it also risks translating ecological relation into a beautifully self-enclosed scene. The final work sharpens the exhibition’s strongest idea. Infinite Library is an eight-metre-wide triangular bookshelf containing more than 2,000 colour-arranged volumes; it rotates above a circular mirror, with projections across the shelves and recordings of Devlin reading selected passages. Designboom identifies James Gleick’s Chaos, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake among the books from her own working collection. [3] The Design Museum says that Penguin Random House UK supplied the books and that they will be donated to local charities after the exhibition, in connection with the National Year of Reading 2026. [1] It also follows Devlin’s earlier library works in Milan, Miami and Yorkshire, and is the first in that series to be installed inside a museum. [3] That planned dispersal is more than a generous coda. A library in an exhibition can too easily turn reading into scenery—spines organised as a colour field, citation as decor. Here, rotation, sound and reflected space make that danger conspicuous. Yet the books’ promised exit refuses the closed circuit of the artist archive. A museum object will be unmade into a social resource. The gesture cannot solve the institutional conditions that make access to books uneven, but it gives the exhibition a material afterlife beyond Devlin’s name. What the archive cannot settle That confidence needs the counterweight of a pointed dissent. Time Out finds the sleek display and pervasive score too mannered, and argues that a museum presentation cannot recover the force of Devlin’s work onstage; the review’s objection is a useful reminder that technical evidence and lived event do not coincide. [7] The other independent accounts broadly support the museum’s framing, while revealing its pressure point. Wallpaper calls the presentation both intimate and sweeping and records Devlin’s explanation that she has offered young designers “every trace that led me along the way” so they can see how a practice develops over three decades. [2] Designboom similarly finds the small scale of the school-era sketches striking against the arena-sized projects they preceded. [3] Their shared emphasis is telling: the show earns its intimacy not by reducing the ambitions of Devlin’s work, but by making ambition’s working debris available. Still, an archive is not a transparent moral record. Devlin’s projects require production knowledge held by many people: performers, musicians, dramaturgs, fabricators, lighting and video teams, engineers, producers, venue staff and audiences who complete an environment by inhabiting it. The Design Museum names the exhibition’s curators—Johanna Agerman Ross, Danielle Thom and Margherita Dosi Delfini—as working in collaboration with Devlin and her studio; Cooper Hewitt’s record of the earlier show also credits exhibition fabrication, graphic design, projection, sound, lighting and audiovisual integration to a broad group of contributors. [3] [4] Those credits are important precisely because a retrospective’s beautiful coherence can make an individual author seem more solitary than the works ever were. Devlin’s studio record makes the practical point sharper: associate designers regularly collaborate on initial concepts and design intent, while the teams that develop and deliver the work expand with a project’s scale. [8] This is the credible limit of the desk’s achievement. Models can show decisions; they cannot replay the labour, negotiation, risk or timing by which an idea survives contact with a theatre, a civic site or a crowd of 70,000. Nor should the museum pretend that an archive makes an ephemeral work permanent. The most it can offer is a score: partial, material and open to re-reading. That is also why the exhibition matters now. Museums are under pressure to make experience visible, shareable and immersive; Devlin has long understood how those demands operate in public. But Other Worlds proposes a more demanding form of access than the instant image. It asks viewers to linger over increments: the line on paper, the folded card, the research book, the turning model and the institutional labour required to move any of them into public space. In the process, the museum receives something rare from spectacle—not its residual glamour, but its instructions for paying attention. Sources & records [1]: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/es-devlin-other-worlds "Design Museum: Es Devlin: Other Worlds" [2]: https://www.wallpaper.com/design-interiors/design-events/es-devlin-design-museum-london "Wallpaper*: How a practice evolves over 30 years: Es Devlin at the Design Museum is both intimate and sweeping" [3]: https://www.designboom.com/design/es-devlin-rotating-library-2000-books-london-design-museum-other-worlds/ "Designboom: Es Devlin’s Infinite Library rotates with more than 2,000 books in London" [4]: https://www.cooperhewitt.org/channel/es-devlin/ "Cooper Hewitt: An Atlas of Es Devlin" [5]: https://www.superblue.com/miami/experience-guide/es-devlin "Superblue Miami: Es Devlin, Forest of Us" [6]: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/artists/es-devlin/ "National Theatre: Es Devlin" [7]: https://www.timeout.com/london/museums/es-devlin "Time Out: Es Devlin: Other Worlds review" [8]: https://www.esdevlin.com/information "Es Devlin: Biography and Studio"

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Image disclosure: The cover is an original editorial still-life illustration, not documentary photography, a work of art, an artist portrait or an exhibition view. THINK PIECE | Source-led cultural profile Deck: At the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Otobong Nkanga made earth, textile, scent, labour and circulation speak to one another. The result was not a consoling ecology of connectedness, but a harder proposition: care has to be designed, handled and maintained—and it does not erase the mark of extraction. 13 October 2026 | Paris / Lausanne Scope: This post-exhibition analysis is grounded in museum records, catalogue material and independent criticism. It does not claim firsthand attendance. A repair manual tells you two things at once: something has failed, and restoration will require a sequence of exact actions. It asks for tools, time, pressure, substitutions and judgment. Otobong Nkanga’s I dreamt of you in colours, the first monographic exhibition of her work in a Paris museum, made that proposition unusually vivid at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. It ran from 10 October 2025 to 22 February 2026 before travelling to the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, where it closed on 23 August. The Paris exhibition’s achievement was to make a practice frequently reduced to “ecological art” read instead as an extended study of maintenance: how bodies, objects, landscapes and institutions hold together, and who pays when they do not. [1] [4] The museum called its organizing concept “strata.” The term carries the geological sense of layers, but Nkanga uses it as a method: bodies and land are not analogous abstractions; they are systems changed by exchange. Materials circulate, acquire value, cross borders and retain the residue of the labour and violence that moved them. Paris assembled installations, photographs, recent work and a substantial group of drawings—some from the early part of her career and previously unshown—rather than presenting a neat march toward mastery. Certain works were reactivated with elements added for the site. That decision matters. A retrospective normally fixes a career into evidence; reactivation leaves the evidence contingent, still capable of receiving another layer. [1] An early body, built from earth The most useful entrance into this structure is not a monumental textile but a small, early photographic work. In Fattening Room (1999), Nkanga appears in a white lace dress with a crinoline skirt, her head bowed in blue light. The image was made while she was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and responding to the Ibibio rite of passage of the same name, which she did not herself undergo. For the work, she built a skirt around her body over a month from compacted soil and white clay, collaborated with a fashion designer on a European-style wedding dress, then had photographs taken, cut them apart and recomposed them. [2] Those are not decorative production details. They establish a vocabulary that the later works enlarge: dress as social instruction, clay as a temporary architecture around the body, and the photograph as a surface that can be cut and reseamed. The process also resists the easy division between “personal” memory and the supposedly impersonal material world. In the exhibition catalogue interview, Nkanga recalls studying mud houses in Ife, made with straw, rock, wood, palm leaves and a mixture of rock and water; the experience helped her think through Fattening Room. [1] A garment can therefore be a landform and a building method, but it remains a garment—with all the expectations about gender, ceremony and appearance that cling to it. That is why the fashion connection in Nkanga’s work is more rigorous than a borrowed language of adornment. In her practice, shimmer is never innocent finish. Tate’s account of In Pursuit of Bling (2014) points to mica, used in cosmetics for its lustre, as a route from desirable surface to extraction’s ethical, human and material consequences. [5] She does not ask viewers to stop enjoying colour, softness or shine. She asks what has been compressed into their availability. For readers alert to the politics of a mineral make-up pigment, a woven wall work or a meticulously made interior, Nkanga offers something more exacting than a lesson in guilt: aesthetic pleasure is a relay in a supply chain. Needles, roots, seams This is where the “manual” in the title becomes literal. In the Paris installation, sharp linear elements repeatedly hold, pierce or suspend things. Apollo’s review describes Contained Measures of Land – The Operation (2008) as severed orange-tree roots bursting through a wall and pierced by large needles. Nearby, Awaiting Pleasures – The Workstation (2003) brought a wooden loom, oversized needles, rope and thread into view. The critic’s decisive observation is that these tools can serve art, industry or violence. [2] Nkanga’s seams do not make damage disappear; they identify where something has been split, and show that joining is an intervention with force behind it. The same tension scales up in The Weight of Scars (2015), a large tapestry made after visits to abandoned mining sites in northern Namibia. Documentary photographs of the scarred landscape appear within the weave, while phantom limbs pull at its imagery. [2] Tapestry is an especially pointed medium for this work. It converts labour into density and time, but also brings the authority of a grand European decorative form. Nkanga does not simply insert a mining story into an inherited luxury object. The material history of weaving becomes part of the question: whose labour has traditionally made walls eloquent, and what does it mean for a damaged site to enter domestic or museum scale as a sumptuous surface? The four Unearthed tapestries of 2021 make the argument less terrestrial and more severe. Their submarine worlds move through zones of the sea, where plant matter, mechanical limbs and bodies subjected to the transatlantic slave trade coexist with the pressure of mining and climate change. [2] In the exhibition interview, Nkanga connects the series to deep-sea extraction: what has settled does not necessarily get to rest, when minerals are again sought for energy and profit. [1] Her images do not turn the ocean into a poetic backdrop for catastrophe. They insist that “below” is already an archive and a workplace. Against repair as consolation The institutional framing is generous, even hopeful. MAM described natural and relational systems’ “reparative capacity” and a possible future; its emphasis on constellations makes the exhibition a persuasive picture of interdependence. [1] But two independent accounts place useful pressure on that language. Yosola Olorunshola’s Apollo review finds the work beautiful precisely because it refuses to romanticise violent histories: black dots may read as holes, pins, wounds or joints. [2] Hyperallergic, meanwhile, identifies sand, glass beads, wood, braided rope and soap among the exhibition’s materials, and characterises the large tapestries through colonialism’s devastating legacies as well as the fragile ties joining people, land and resources. [3] Together, these accounts make clear that repair is not the show’s sentimental final scene. It is a contested procedure. A pin can mend or puncture. A thread can connect, bind or pull apart. A carpet can invite the body into a less formal relation with the museum while still being an art object subject to access, care and rules. From Where I Stand (2015), the chromojet-printed carpet acquired by MAM in 2022, was conceived by the artist as a place where visitors might lie down and see both carpet and museum differently, potentially making it a place for conversation. The Paris programme also activated the work in a performance on 10 January 2026. [1] [5] [9] That is a modest but radical redesign of spectatorship: not participation as spectacle, but a changed posture from which to consider an institution and its holdings. Nkanga’s trajectory gives this question a real institutional scale. Born in Kano in 1974 and based in Antwerp, she trained in Ile-Ife, Paris and Amsterdam; surveys and solo presentations have moved through Chicago, Tate St Ives, the Gropius Bau, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Castello di Rivoli, MoMA and the Nasher Sculpture Center. [1] [6] The Paris project drew from international public and private collections as well as her studio, while MAM’s own collection supplied From Where I Stand. [1] This is not the career of an artist standing outside museums and issuing a purity test. It is the career of someone working inside the routes by which objects, research, capital and institutional attention accumulate. That proximity sharpens the most serious limit—and the most serious ambition—of Nkanga’s repair language. Carved to Flow, begun for documenta 14 in 2017, turned soap into a distribution system. O8 Black Stone bars were made from oils, butters and other ingredients sourced across the Mediterranean, Middle East and North and West Africa; they were produced in Athens and assembled in Kassel as lattice-like sculptural stocks. Their sale was also a public-space performance: under specified conditions, performers could refuse a transaction. The proceeds were intended to support the Carved to Flow Foundation in Akwa Ibom and a space in Athens. [7] [8] Here “support” is not a museum label pasted onto an object. The project’s own text treats support as a structural, social and economic act: to hold up, provide for and reinforce. [7] Yet that is an experiment, not an alibi. A foundation sustained by sales of art-adjacent objects remains entangled with the unequal economies of circulation that Nkanga traces. The promise is not that a bar of soap can compensate for extractive trade, or that an exhibition can make a supply chain just. Its value lies in refusing to leave care at the level of imagery. Soap dissolves; a support structure requires continuous administration, people, resources and trust. Frieze described Carved to Flow as a test of a circular economy rather than a completed alternative to exploitative finance. [8] The distinction is important. Why return to the Paris strata now, after both museum presentations have ended? Because cultural institutions are increasingly fluent in the language of sustainability while still treating materials as display assets and repair as a reassuring theme. Nkanga’s work is harder on that comfort. It requires that we see a bead, a mineral, a carpet, an aromatic wall or a dress not as evidence of a refined sensibility but as a record of handling: extraction, transportation, fashioning, use, contamination, conversation and eventual change. Its pleasure is real, and so is its cost. The repair manual is not a metaphor because the work makes the terms of repair material, procedural and public. It also refuses the fantasy that careful making will leave no scar. Sources & records [1]: https://www.mam.paris.fr/en/expositions/exhibitions-otobong-nkanga-0 "Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris: Otobong Nkanga, I dreamt of you in colours" [2]: https://apollo-magazine.com/otobong-nkanga-artist-musee-d-art-moderne-paris-review/ "Apollo: Otobong Nkanga gets down to fundamentals" [3]: https://hyperallergic.com/top-10-paris-art-shows-of-2025/ "Hyperallergic: The 10 Best Paris Art Shows of 2025" [4]: https://www.mcba.ch/en/exhibitions/otobong-nkanga/ "Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne: Otobong Nkanga, I dreamt of you in colours" [5]: https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/otobong-nkanga-where-i-stand "Tate: Otobong Nkanga, From Where I Stand" [6]: https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/programs-events/nasher-prize/laureates/laureate/id/320 "Nasher Sculpture Center: Otobong Nkanga, 2025 Laureate" [7]: https://www.carvedtoflow.com/ "Carved to Flow: Project by Otobong Nkanga" [8]: https://www.frieze.com/article/otobong-nkanga-excavates-material-histories "Frieze: Otobong Nkanga Excavates Material Histories" [9]: https://www.mam.paris.fr/sites/default/files/documents/en_dp_otobong_nkanga_mam.pdf "Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris: Otobong Nkanga press kit"